Hasta La Gadget!

With Best Buy, Cricket, and Leap already signed on as partners, LightSquared has a lot riding on the success of its nationwide LTE network. Unfortunately, the Airforce’s concerns about it interfering with GPS have been born by a test run in New Mexico. Officials in charge of the state’s 911 systems as well as trucker hat kings Deere & Co. reported loss of service up to 22 miles away from LightSquared’s cell tower. The company believes it has a solution to the interference problem, but hasn’t specified exactly what the fix might be. Now the 4G wholesaler’s future rests on a June 15th report to the FCC detailing the potential issues for both consumer navigators and the precision GPS systems used by the military and airlines — but when even John Deere is lobbying against you things start to look a little bleak.

LightSquared’s LTE breaks GPS in New Mexico trial, angers John Deere originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Japanese camera company Pentax today launched a very cool new add on to their digital SLR cameras which wil have camera enthusiasts and star gazers alike excited. The new product is a GPS unit which along with giving basic location data to automatically geo tag your snaps, also contains a tracking system for “celestial bodies”.

The new piece of camera kit easily mounts onto the hotshoe of any of the Pentax SLR cameras and records various location data onto captured images including: the latitude, longitude, altitude, universal time coordinated (UTC) and direction of the shooting. The user can then later use programs such as Google Earth to pull up the exact spot the photo was shot from.

The very cool “Astrotracer” function is a particularly interesting inovation which automatically follows stars, planets or other objects in the sky capturing clear images even on long exposures. The system works by calculating the movement of the stars using latitude obtained from GPS data and the cameras alignment obtained from its magnetic acceleration sensors. The image sensor then shifts automatically tracking the movement in real time. UFO hunting just got a lot easier!!

Location based technology and geo-tagging is becoming very popular and with sites such as foursquare we could see this kind of technology being linked in to a number of new platforms. It won’t be long before photo sharing sites team up with location based sites to take full advantage of the new technology.

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TomTom’s already seen Google muscle in on its turf in a big way, and it looks like it might now be trying to return the favor. If camera-toting vans like the one above are any indication, it would appear that the company is currently working to bolster its navigation options with its own Street View-like service. So far, all of the van sightings seem to be confined to Europe (France and Belgium, specifically), and they of course don’t necessarily confirm that TomTom is indeed working on a Street View competitor — although we have to wonder what the vans are for if it’s not. It’s also worth noting that TomTom did acquire TeleAtlas, which uses vans equipped with cameras, lasers and GPS in the actual creation of its maps, but the higher, 360-degree camera used on these vans seems much closer to those used on Google’s Street View cars. Seen one yourself? Feel free to let us know in the comments below.

TomTom working on its own Street View-like service? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 May 2011 23:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you picked up one of those G-Tablets, but are now suffering from buyer’s remorse after realizing how much you miss GPS, there’s a solution — provided you have a strong DIY streak. It turns out Viewsonic set space aside on the Froyo-powered slate’s motherboard to place a GPS receiver. Of course, if you even have to ask what flux is or what SMD stands for this is not the hack for you. And while apps that rely on 3G, such as Google Maps, won’t work properly, offline navigators like Navigon and CoPilot should be just fine. If you’re comfortable tearing open your device and poking at it with a hot iron, hit up the source link for a complete list of parts and some very detailed instructions… or, you could just buy a tablet that already has GPS.

[Thanks, Andrew F.]

Add GPS to your Viewsonic G-Tablet and test your soldering skills originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 May 2011 13:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ZMP RoboCar ditches driver, creates own map (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 May 2011 11:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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